So what is the chance they put out an insurance file that they know can be decrypted by the NSA and has really damaging documents in it? I mean it would be a way of showing the NSA what you have, having it already in the hands of a bunch of other people. I wonder if that would be a useful strategy. It could give the NSA time to build a counter story (parallel construction :-) which would be mitigate some of the impact, but it could also be construed as a form of "responsible disclosure" letting them know before the world knows so they can "patch their systems."
I hope some creative writer is out there doing some exploration out there in a novel. Lots of interesting questions to think about with regard to the mechanics of this whole story.
If they're releasing something that they could reasonably expect the NSA to be able to crack, there's a non-zero chance other governments would be able to read it as well. That's not really "responsible disclosure" anymore.
It would be safer to just send the decryption key directly to the NSA on a CD. ;)
The NSA dedicates most of its resources to "working smarter not harder." If they have discovered a weakness in AES, it could be as little as running a single executable on a Macbook Air.
If by "working" you mean "bullying" and "strong arming" and "threatening" and "blackmailing" people. It doesn't take a lot of energy to bullying somebody into putting trojan horses into their encrypted email service, and threatening to arrest them if they shut down their company. What kind of dirt do you think they have on Obama and Pelosi and the rest of the Senate and House of Representatives, to make them so cooperative? More like "Work illegally, not smarter."
We do not know that. Using thermodynamics we can establish a limit on how much computation we can do (if I recall correctly Applied Chryptography says that a super nova does not have sufficient energy to count to 2^256 in base 2). However, we have no theoretical bases regarding how much computation is involved in breaking AES256. All we do know is that we (the public) do not know of a way to do it.
I hope some creative writer is out there doing some exploration out there in a novel. Lots of interesting questions to think about with regard to the mechanics of this whole story.